


Still Won't Leave You Alone

by the_casual_cheesecake



Category: Marvel, Marvel 616
Genre: Avengers Vol. 5 (2013), Blow Jobs, M/M, New Avengers Vol. 3 (2013), Not A Fix-It, Old Steve Rogers, Superior Iron Man Vol 1. (2015), hickmanvengers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-06
Updated: 2019-09-06
Packaged: 2020-10-11 09:07:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,246
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20543618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_casual_cheesecake/pseuds/the_casual_cheesecake
Summary: "That the two of you met in secret. For a meeting of the mind--for one last chance to bury the hatchet." -Natasha RomanoffThe world is dying, everything is ruined. Steve breaks into Tony's penthouse for a last interlude with an old friend.





	Still Won't Leave You Alone

**Author's Note:**

> It's been a while since I've written anything but I got inspired to get back into it by the Stevetony discord. Menaces the whole lot of them.  
Thank you to my betas wynnesome, who talked incredible meta with me about this one-shot, Antrodemus, whose punctuation help is literally what makes this thing readable, KittKat who pointed me towards more beautiful sentences, (and Loran, who cheered me on and talked Stevetony meta with me for the sequel). Any mistakes left are entirely my own.
> 
> Title comes from "Smoke & Mirrors" by Agnes Obel.

The thing about this life Tony has chosen is that it lends itself to delusions of grandeur. Being a superhero gives the illusion of godhood for anybody who dons a mask, but by virtue of being himself, he finds he’s capable of achieving it much more successfully.

Repression too, is a familiar state. He’s lived in it all his life, even before Afghanistan, before the open-heart surgery in the middle of the desert. He knows it like an old friend. It is rogue code in his addictive personality, disguised as a natural system design, a fail-safe against immediate self-destruction. 

The fact is, a rogue code is no better than a virus, it’s unworthy of existing in his system. Limitations, like any well-intentioned firewall, give him an itch under his skin. It's an invitation and a challenge -- and he can no more leave it alone than he could a particularly intense argument. Limitations are their own kind of foreplay, and sometimes, the fact of their existence is the familiar starting note in his dance with self-restraint.

He’s standing in his penthouse. There’s a window open; the contrast of the wind and the warmth inside is making him shiver, but the San Francisco skyline is beautiful just now and he’s loathe to leave it behind.

He takes a sip of the whiskey in his crystal glass, and waits for his visitor to find him. The armor purrs from within him like it’s jealous of the air that gets to caress his skin while it lays dormant, hidden. The concept is absurd. The armor is him, his thoughts manifested in gleaming silver.

It occurs to him that he’s wasting time with these odes to himself, while inside his head, alarms blare about an intruder, whose entry his drones failed to observe. He looks at his hand and retrieves a repulsor from inside his bones in 0.3 seconds, and waits. His view is magnificent.

It surprises him only a little when he hears the familiar military footsteps outside the door. Steve has always walked like he was conversing with the earth; he screams his anger through the soles of his feet as though making his footsteps loud enough will gentle his voice .

Tony accesses his electronic lock and opens the door before Steve has time to decide whether he’ll be taking it down. Tony thinks he used to look at Steve’s kind of unattainable strength, his ability to force the world to bend to accommodate him, and love him for it. He wonders how he could’ve been so blind to Steve’s skewed worldview. 

How tragic it must have been to suddenly be robbed of it. Steve must feel like a child, abandoned halfway through a maze, clawing and yelling at the hedges, hoping he’ll wear a hole in the world.

Tony very deliberately doesn’t turn around, even when Steve’s spicy scent hits his nose and makes him, despite the debauchery of his last few weeks, weak in the knees.

Limitation, thy name is Steve Rogers.

Steve stops just behind Tony, a wall made of flesh and deeply contained rage. Tony can feel the heat of him on his skin; the cold air at his front is, for an instant, sharply uninviting and foreign. Tony doesn’t sway back, but he can’t help but glance at him; There’s something about an angry Captain America that gives off a predatory vibe, like Steve is seconds away from pouncing on his prey, even if he’s decided to stay calm and not walk in fists first. 

Oh Steve, restraint doesn’t become you.

“Are you here to kill me or to fuck me, Steve? Or have you not made up your mind yet?” Tony taunts. He distinctly feels the phantom ache of Steve’s shield breaking his face as the words come out of his mouth, but he doesn’t flinch. Thinking back, that war was the only time his past self wasn’t an utter disappointment.

Steve growls, and one hand lands on Tony’s neck, grabbing him roughly, Whiskey splashes on them both as he’s spun around. Steve’s eyes lock onto Tony’s and he doesn’t look away. His gaze feels like a physical weight, like Steve wants to imprison him in any way he can and he has nothing more to restrain him with, but this. Tony suppresses a shiver, and if he had to use Extremis for it, the logs are already lost. 

So, the calm demeanor was an affect after all.

The grip is not painful, Steve’s weathered hand would be easy to shrug off, really, but who would Tony be if he didn’t indulge an old friend.

“You repulse me.” Steve hisses. Tony fights the urge to narrow his eyes, remaining lax, naked in his house robe, being held upright by Steve. He smiles at him, a small twitch of the mouth, more a taunt than anything else.

Steve lets go as if he’s been burned. Tony wonders if the expression of disgust would hurt more coming from a younger Steve. He wonders if he should activate the Extremis already inside him to find out. He doesn’t do it. 

He moves to the bar to refill his glass and keeps Steve in his periphery. Steve is clenching and unclenching his fist; it’s a strangely vulnerable gesture to be making in front of hostile forces but Tony guesses it must be difficult when said hostile forces are wearing the face of a friend.

There is something satisfying about holding the power of his own existence over Steve; something dark uncurling inside him as, from across the room, he watches Steve attempt to put on his soldier face. It’s something possessive enough to swallow this man whole, if only to keep him from looking at anybody else with this many emotions on his face. 

He smiles a Tony Stark smile and pours himself another drink.

“Well, if you’re not going to answer me, I’m going to have to guess.” He pauses for a moment and rubs his chin, “Are you here for Extremis, or for the Illuminati Cap?”

“ You’re not the only monster I’m chasing. Tony, where are they?”

Tony laughs. 

Is that what Steve thinks of himself now, maybe always has, a monster slayer, a noble knight on a quest to save virtue from the clutches of evil. 

“I’m not here to play games with you Tony.” Steve says firmly, like a commanding officer. Tony wonders if Steve thinks the cadence of his voice is capable of bending reality to his will, just by virtue of how often it has already happened.

“Darling, we’re playing one right now.” Tony takes a sip from his glass. Steve follows the movement of his hand to his mouth and flinches almost imperceptibly when the alcohol touches Tony’s lips, as if he could taste the burn on Tony’s tongue from across the room.

“Were you always this full of bullshit, Anthony?” Steve spits the words out like venom, and now it’s Tony’s turn to flinch.

Steve never calls him Anthony. Many people do; his friends did. Tony knows Bruce called him Anthony when he was angry at him. Reed and Stephen, the academics from the world of big names and big titles, called him Anthony when they wanted to lecture back at him. 

Steve used to call him “Mister Stark,” before he knew who he was, and then he was Tony, softly spoken before battle like something Steve wanted to cherish in his mouth, then Tony, screamed loud and with hurt that spilled over with every syllable, then he was Tony, a whimper slipping from Steve’s mouth like a prayer as he lost himself inside Tony’s body. Never Anthony. Anthony had no meaning to it. Anthony was a stranger on Steve’s lips.

Tony’s heart doesn’t hurt. Tony’s hand doesn’t shake. Tony Stark does not expect kindness, because he himself has none to spare. He has become superior; he has become, all at once death to entire universes and life that spreads like a miracle throughout his own. 

Tony’s legs do not stumble as they carry him across the room.

“Aren’t you curious how it would be now Cap?” Tony leans a hip against the wall next to Steve, letting his robe fall a little more open.

Steve’s eyes narrow and he moves with surprising speed towards him until Tony can feel his breath on his face. He grabs Tony’s jaw with one hand and squeezes, and god, Steve’s still so angry, it’s written in every line on his face. Tony swallows around his grip, there's a thrill to being this close to an angry Steve. 

“You want me to fuck you Tony? Are you that desperate or are you just delusional?” He smiles a cruel smile that changes the map of his wrinkles and huffs out a laugh as he angles Tony’s face towards his, it’s an unkind noise. Everything about this Steve is cruel, even his blue eyes are hard as ocean rocks, Tony could cut himself on that gaze just as well as he could on the shield.

“I think you want me to want you to fuck me Cap,” Tony taunts through Steve’s grip, “so why don’t you do us both a favor and get it out of your system?”

The hand on his jaw tightens and then slips down to his throat. Steve’s eyes follow the path of his fingers with something akin to fascination, like he’s watching foreign hands through a screen. 

“What’s wrong with you Tony?” he snarls.

“Absolutely nothing is.” Tony replies weakly through Steve’s grip, he smiles wide and open and lets his eyes glaze over with extremis white for three seconds.

The universe and Tony don't always see eye to eye, but this particular situation they’ve collaborated on is too lovely not to consider a proper gift. The irony of Steve, old and frail, showing every year he's lived as marks on his skin, the super soldier, human at last, down to every flaw. And Tony, perfected with his tech like he was always meant to be; unblemished and allpowerful. 

Steve squeezes his neck tighter, restricting his air flow for a moment. Tony wonders if Steve did it with his old strength in mind, he also wonders if he would have let him do it regardless. His touch should be alien on Tony’s skin, Steve’s hand should feel just as old and foreign as his ethics.

Steve's anguish and loss seep from under his rage and flows out of his eyes. Tony imagines that inside Steve’s head, Tony’s also a very familiar stranger.

Steve moves his palm across Tony’s neck until he’s cradling his head in his hand; he starts walking without a word, expecting Tony to move or be moved.

Tony, ever so giving, decides to keep indulging.

Steve moves to the armchair in the middle of the room, facing the open window, and pushes Tony down to his knees as he lowers himself to sit.

Steve’s knees creak with the movement. Tony thinks about what it would be like to see inside his skin, watch his ancient bones grind against each other, see how his real body works, without the added glamour. See the frame that holds his ancient brain and keeps it from succumbing to the rot of his rigid ideas. He could. 

He tries out the thought in his head. It would take less than a second and Extremis will move through Steve’s cells and make him perfect again, Tony would get to see it happen in crisp details. If he so wished, he could synchronize their cells throughout; They would live, for a moment, as one entity, a paradox of contradictions glued together by his will alone. He won’t.

So, Steve stays an old man; his hand, resting on his uniformed thigh, liver spotted and wrinkled, and the look on his face a portrait of resignation and violent, red anger.

Tony feels a twinge of greedy triumph that he has his claws so deep in this man, that he can still evoke his anger from the bottomless pit that Steve keeps it in, moreso, because he now holds the power to reverse this unnatural role exchange between them; it’s an unsaid truth that must hit Steve between his fragile old ribs like a viciously thin knife, that all he has to do is ask Tony for it.

With one hand on Tony’s head, casually, with no preamble, Steve pulls down his zipper and pulls out his cock, it’s still soft, and it’s not the proud, jutting thing Tony remembers, but Tony’s deeply ingrained sense-memory of being on his knees for this man makes it familiar enough that he could already feel it on his tongue. 

Steve’s hand tightens in his hair and pushes him down impatiently, like he ought to have started moving on his own.

Tony aims for amused as he looks up at Steve, but Steve doesn’t give an inch, just glares more and tightens his grip.

Tony lowers his face to nuzzle at the base of Steve’s cock. He closes his eyes and fights a whimper as the familiar smell hit his nose. He kisses the length of it starting with the grey hair around the base and moving down until his mouth is around the head. he suckles on it lazily until Steve lets out a heavy breath and moves his head for him to take more of it in his mouth. It’s still soft and Tony moves a hand up to stroke Steve, but Steve  _ tsks _ and grabs it in his free hands before it reaches its target.

Steve settles himself more comfortably in the armchair and starts guiding Tony’s movements with the grip he has on his hair, the nerve endings on Tony’s scalp spark hot need down his spine and to his cock. Steve fucks his mouth absentmindedly, but his hand cradles Tony’s head like a prized possession, It’s an oxymoron of affection, it’s what Steve has been driven to by his own unyielding worship at the altar of what he represents; restraint broken by need. 

It takes a while until Steve is hard in his mouth, and by that time Tony’s jaw aches in tandem with his scalp, a distant sort of ache, like Extremis is filtering it through, but less artificial.

Steve is breathing heavily above him. Tony realizes that he’s speaking, maybe he has been for a while, Tony just hadn’t noticed.

“-to keep you quiet, Tony? To give your lying fucking tongue a reason to be in your mouth? Mmm like that yes… you like it like this Tony? Is this what you sat here thinking about as you fucked a city to its knees? -fuck.” 

Steve is looking at his cock sliding in and out of Tony’s mouth with hunger, like he's starving for something unattainable. His eyes aren't meeting Tony's anymore, Tony moves Extremis to glaze over them just to check if Steve is paying attention to him at all, but then closes them before he can find out. 

He keeps them closed and imagines Steve possessed, just like he is now but wild and raging. A Steve that would look at Tony's new face and want to wreck it not because it's wrong but because it belongs to him and it holds no marks to show it. 

He wonders if he'd let him; his whole body shivers at the next thrust. 

Steve fucks Tony’s mouth like it’s inanimate, like the only concession he’s willing to make to acknowledge Tony’s presence are the words spilling out of his mouth.

Tony's thoughts are made of cotton, they spin themselves around him and Steve and scatter, too thin, at the edges of where the room's borders begin.

Minutes (or hours) later when Steve comes, he does it with a final push that drags his cock across the roof of Tony’s mouth and into his throat. It’s rough and Tony chokes and sputters on it. Steve just pets Tony’s head and shushes him, he massages Tony’s jaw as he pumps his hips closer, once, twice, thrice and then he relaxes where he sits. His cock spent and resting on his uniform pants.

Tony feels dazed. He coughs to clear his throat and then rests his head on Steve’s knee. His own cock is desperately hard, and poking out of his robes but he can’t find the energy to do anything about it, and neither, it seems, does Steve.

They didn’t used to do this before. Before the war it was gentle, almost reverent, Steve would murmur words of praise in Tony’s ear like he couldn’t bear having Tony not know how happy he was. Tony tries to think back to the escalation of their relationship, and then finds that he really doesn’t fucking care. He buries his face in between Steve’s knees and burrows in until his senses are entombed in the other man. He expects Steve to move, to move him away, but Steve only sets a hand back on Tony’s head quietly.

The air hits Tony’s back in tender caresses, he fails to suppress a shiver. Somewhere in the back of his head Extremis is feeding him the news, the weather, the hex number of the exact shade of blue of Steve’s uniform, and with every second, it gets louder; a constant ringing that reminds Tony of going to the ENT as a child.

Steve stands up eventually, leaving Tony on his knees. He moves to the window and looks out at the city, adjusts his clothes as he walks and doesn’t even glance at Tony.

“I’m leaving, and the next time I see you, Anthony, one of us is not walking out.” Steve says with a level voice like he’s chatting about the coffee, like the thought of killing Tony, or dying by his hands is inevitable. It feels like a promise.

Tony’s head feels fuzzy, despite the Extremis, so he lets Steve have the last word.

He eventually moves to the shower and stays under the water for a long time. He feels hollow, like Steve dug a piece out of him before he left, his head is still ringing and his cock is still hard as rock.

Depression, Tony knows, is only so dangerous because even though you know it’s hitting you; you can’t make it stop. The realization is pointless and carries a stench of condescension with it. The flow of time is disturbed, and you find yourself incapable of acting on the decisions you’ve made in the right time to make a difference.

Extremis can regulate his brain chemistry; he just has to start the process himself.

He can’t move a muscle when he can’t breathe. He can’t start the flow of serotonin and noradrenaline into his cells if he can’t think.

What an utter joke.

He’d like to inhibit the happy fucking chemical flow of all this wretched city and watch it burn if he could, he’ll watch the city act out the farce of his own head and revel in the joy of it all.

Two days later, the Illuminati communicator in his palm flashes red with the light of an incursion. It's not the first one since the battle with the Red Skull, but it's the first one that he finds himself compelled to witness.

Later, he will wonder if acting on that feeling was an act of self-harm and he'll laugh bitterly into his broken armor and wish he were more successful in it.


End file.
